Siel, thank you again for your efforts. This latest batch is among my favourites thus far.

Quick question - how does your 'Recruit All Creed Characters' patch differ from Earl's 'Recruit everyone at Creed's' patch from several years ago? Unfortunately, I am unable to relocate the original thread for Earl's patch, but a direct download link is available via SirHedge's Hacking Resources thread.

I am only making the assumption that you are familiar with Earl's patch. If I am mistaken then please feel free to disregard my question. And as my intent may not be translated properly through text, please let me explain that I am in no one way insinuating any patch ideas were borrowed or stolen or anything of the like; I ask only because I would ideally like to utilise the patch with the best implementation and fewest possible issues.

Last edited by projectego on Fri Jul 05 2019 12:14am, edited 2 times in total.

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From a quick comparison, the only practical difference I could find was that:In the vanilla game, after a Creed character joins, Bowie's controls are locked up for the duration of the three other choices spinning into reminiaturization and getting deleted. In both patches, the spinning and deletion are removed, but Earl's patch keeps the control lock while mine doesn't, so Bowie is stuck in place for a while in Earl's patch for seemingly no reason.

but another technical and inconsequential difference is that:

WARNING: SPOILER!

Interestingly, the spinning and reminiaturization effect might possibly not have been there from the start either: when talking to one of the Creed characters, the game checks for a flag to see whether or not another character had been picked already to decide whether to play their please-let-me-join dialogue or to play their pouting rejected line again instead. Since the unchosen characters disappear from the map anyway in vanilla, this check and its flag obviously end up being irrelevant and superfluous. Or maybe they were just an extra safeguard placed just in case.

So, the other technical difference between the two patches is how the above is handled:Earl's patch skips turning on the flag when a character is chosen. Mine still turns it on, but skips the check for it instead. The outcome in practice of course ends up being the same either way: unchosen characters continue to offer to join as if nobody has been chosen yet, and I don't think the specific flag is relevant anywhere else in the game.

I see. Thank you for taking the time to compare both patches. I will most definitely be favouring yours, moving forwards.

I am not sure if this is even too trivial for you to consider, but there exists a very minor inconsistency in vanilla SF2 that involves one of the dwarf NPCs 'speaking' with the wrong sound effect for one line of dialogue. Effectively, the scene has a female fairy NPC concluding her dialogue, and when the male dwarf delivers his first line, it uses the same female NPC speech sound effect until his follow-up dialogue triggers. The issue can be heard here.

SFC user Ronnen released a 'Show Enemy Level' patch several years ago (available to download via this thread), which is much appreciated, but I quite like the mystery of not knowing how capable an enemy combatant might be - even if the majority of them aren't too difficult. If you feel it worthy of your time, I would love to request a patch that would display a '?' for all enemies that are between the levels of 1-9; a '??' for all enemies that are between 10-99; and '???' for all levels thereafter. Failing that, a single '?' for all levels would still be great. The inconsistency of unknown enemy HP and MP being displayed as '??' and all levels showing as 'N/A' always sort of irked me.

(Images for clarification)

WARNING: SPOILER!

I'm not sure if these are ideas you might be interested in pursuing, but I thought that I might throw them out there.

SFMods.com: A community for mod authors to share graphical assets and resources for use with modding Shining Force and Shining Force II.

Thanks Stor for the sticky and thanks Siel for sharing your knowledge.

I have a simple question: How do I edit stuff into my inventory?

I'm at the dwarven village and I don't want to go through all the rigamarole with the RNG.I have done this before but I haven't attempted it in many many years. I'm vaguely remembering something like "caravan Party Editor" or "Inventory Editor" or something like that.

I have BNC's and SpaceKing's editors but I cant inject weapons directly into my inventory, or at least I don't know how.

I'm doing a test run for my Master Rom Mod (witch I'm anxious to share with you all and get some feedback) and I've changed up a lot of the mithril weapons and I only want to test their performance.

re: hidden levelThe game actually writes out both the level and EXP's "N/A" display in one go while also partially recycling the same code to do it, so the code is already more compact than I expected and I couldn't figure out how to make room for a custom level check (without having to migrate the code elsewhere). In the meantime, I made a patch for the single-"?"-for-all-levels fallback, which is how the original unlocalized SF2 displayed it anyway. As a bonus, I also threw in a double "??" variant.

Fun fact: since there's a chance Bowie's inventory is full, that entire scene is actually a forced NPC interaction sandwiched between two individual cutscenes. And they must've forgotten to set a voice in the NPC interaction.

Siel, I've got a small question. Don't recall if it was asked before in this thread, so pardon me if I'm being repetitive.

What kind of vanilla SF II ROM do your patches need? Is it standard 2 MB one or 4 MB Caravan expanded one? Or both? And do effects carrying on if I use your patches on 2 MB ROM and then expand it in the Caravan?

I haven't tested thoroughly, but I think the patches should work regardless of 2MB/4MB expansions or EU/US versions.

AFAIK, the Cavaran's expansion just clones some data banks to elsewhere without touching the game's functionality, so it shouldn't matter whether the patches are applied before or after expanding either.

As for the EU/US thing, I've been basing my patches on the US version, but some quick tests seem to show them working with the EU version too. At a quick glance, I think the differences between the versions are just in minor things like the staff roll and title screen? And the FPS setting, of course.